What it is
The boundary between general language and special language is crossed in both directions, and neither crossing is a translator's decision.
Terminologization is the inbound direction. A word or phrase from general language is recruited to designate a concept in a special language, and in the process acquires a definition it did not have. Valeontis and Mantzari describe it as one of the mechanisms that work by using existing forms, alongside conversion, transdisciplinary borrowing and semantic transfer, and circuit is one of their own instances. What changes is not the form but its accountability: the ordinary word answered to usage, and the term answers to a definition.
Determinologization is the outbound direction. A term escapes the field that defined it and enters general use, and it loses the definitional and systemic unambiguity it had inside the system of concepts it came from. The process is gradual, driven by frequency of use, and has fuzzy boundaries, which is why it is better described as scalable than as an event.
Both are facts about a lexical item in a speech community over time. That is the boundary against the neighbouring technique record: choosing a register is a decision, while a word crossing this boundary is language changing underneath everybody.
Where the authorities stand
The standing is descriptive, and the useful structure comes from Meyer and Mackintosh, whose two-way split of determinologization is the part worth having. In the first type, lay users apply the term to the same concept, and what differs is only the degree to which they understand it: the essential meaning is retained and the precision is diluted. In the second, the lexical form ceases to refer to the original concept at all and comes to designate something else. Nová labels the two as retention of the fundamental domain sense and dilution of the original domain sense, which is a usable pair of names for a reviser.
Two cautions. Meyer and Mackintosh's own text is not open, and the split above is set out here on the authority of the later studies that quote it with page references rather than on a reading of the original. And the second author's given name is Kristen, which is worth stating because the publisher's contents page gives an initial only.
There is also a genuine disagreement about whose act this is. The account above treats determinologization as language change in a community. Wang and Washbourne use the same word for something a translator does, the de-sciencing of a scientific term into something familiar rather than technical, in the service of effect. Both usages are in print, and a record that reported only the first would be misdescribing the literature.
Where the process has been measured, the measurement is recent and corpus-based. Levická tracks the Slovak term naratív across a national corpus of nearly two billion tokens and finds it roughly eight times denser in specialized than in journalistic writing, with journalistic frequency rising sharply between 2014 and 2022, and with the two registers sharing only about a third of their adjectival collocates. Determinologization shows up as divergence in what a word combines with, before it shows up in any dictionary.
Consequences for translation
- A determinologized item in a source text may be used in its loose sense. A translator primed by the domain will render it with the tight specialist term, which is an error of register that reads as precision.
- The reverse error is commoner in student work and no less serious: failing to recognize a specialized term inside an ordinary-looking word and rendering it as general vocabulary.
- Two languages sit at different points on the same traffic. A word may have determinologized in the source language and not in the target, so that a literal rendering imports a precision the source no longer had.
- The evidence is collocational. What a word combines with in a general corpus against a specialized one tells you which sense is live, and dictionaries lag behind that by years.
Examples
EN>SK
- Source: adrenaline
- Target: adrenalín
- Comment: The same word at two points on the traffic, visible in the lexicography. Nová sets the entries side by side and finds the British one looking purely terminological while the Slovak carries a separate blurred sense, even though the British example sentence would fit that blurred sense perfectly well. The determinologization is equally real in both; only one dictionary has recorded it.
SK>EN
- Source: naratív
- Target: narrative
- Comment: The measured case, and it runs the other way. Levická dates the Slovak term's move into journalistic use to the years after 2014, well after the English source term had made the same move. Translating into Slovak in that window, the loose English sense had no settled Slovak counterpart, which is the practical shape of a lag between two communities.
References
- Meyer, I. and Mackintosh, K. (2000). "When terms move into our everyday lives: An overview of de-terminologization." Terminology 6(1), 111 to 138.
- Valeontis, K. and Mantzari, E. (2006). "The Linguistic Dimension of Terminology: Principles and Methods of Term Formation." First Athens International Conference on Translation and Interpretation, section 4.2.2.
- Nová, J. (2018). "Terms embraced by the general public: how to cope with determinologization in the dictionary?" Proceedings of the XVIII EURALEX International Congress, 387 to 397, at pp. 389 to 390 and 396.
- Levická, J. (2025). "Corpus-based analysis of the Slovak term naratív as an example of determinologisation." Terminologija 32.
- Wang, F. and Washbourne, K. (2022). "Technical and scientific terms in poetry translation." The Journal of Specialised Translation 38, 55 to 74.
- Dobnik, N. (2019). "Didactics of specialized translation: experiences and observations on student translation errors in the case of a wine-related document." Scripta Manent 14, 49 to 69.